Curse of the Worgen #1 Review

I suppose I could make a pun about Worgen Freeman but that would just be silly

Aside from being a MMO addict I’m also a bit of a comics connoisseur and thus decided to combine both hobbies together and pick up the first issue of Curse of the Worgen which was released in the US yesterday and the UK today. In the interest of brevity for all you busy city slicker lawyer readers out there, I shall summarise the book in a mere single word: meh.

First up, let me give you some credentials so you know I’m just not another phony who claims to be a buff at something but really isn’t (just like that guy we all know who says he really love Star Wars but still couldn’t tell you who General Veers is or who was the commander of the Home One was – five geek points to anyone who knows). No siree, I know them comic books and have been reading them since I was a youngin’, starting “professionally” around the age of 12 and collecting them every week ever since (my teenage years were thrilling let me tell you). I even had a classic Jim Lee poster of Batman hanging above my bed for the past six years until my wife eventually refused to put up with it any more (I always thought it was kind of a turn on for her but apparently she doesn’t share my affinity for buff crime fighters).

Anyway, back to Curse of the Worgen. This was actually the first WoW related comic I’ve read because I always felt tie-ins with computer games were kinda cheap although I have been sorely tempted to check out Walter Simonson’s WoW run as I loved his work on Thor in the mid 80’s. Unfortunately CotW doesn’t benefit from any of his talents and, although interesting enough, is brimming with some rather distracting hackneyed characters.

Without giving away too much of the story, the comic is set in Gilneas just days before “the fall” (when the entire population got turned into Worgens) and and focuses on, one can only assume, a purposefully caricatured Warcraft version of Sherlock Holmes investigating murders by the “Starlight Slasher”. Suffice to say our Holmes rip-off gets captured by a Worgen who begins to relate the story of how their species came to be and then the whole thing ends very ominously, tempting the reader to pick up issue two.

The lore and background is by far the most interesting thing about this comic and it’s actually pretty cool to be able to discover it all right before Cataclysm is released in a few weeks. Credit really has to go to Blizzard for creating such an interesting backstory though and I can only guess that most of it will be explained in-game via quests anyway, kinda making this whole comic book a little redundant.

The writing isn’t awful but it’s very predictable and the dialog is downright cringeworthy at times, particularly in the banter between the Night Elves. The artwork is pretty and suits the style of the comic and the Warcraft universe well enough so I can’t really complain on that front.

By far my biggest gripe with the whole thing though is it’s price. To be fair, DC aren’t at fault here because it only costs $2.99 in the US but I paid a whopping £4.25 for it over here, the equivalent to $6.80, over twice the price. Frankly, I just can’t justify spending that amount of money on a, at best, average comic. I don’t why the markup in price is so massive because it’s not quite as bad with other comics (although it is getting worse every year).

So that’s my take on Curse of the Worgen #1. All in all, very mediocre and only recommended for die hard WoW fans.

“I can only guess that most of it will be explained in-game via quests anyway, kinda making this whole comic book a little redundant”

Methinks you might be wrong here. Varian Wrynn (you, know the king of Stormwind who you might consider to be, let me think here, a major plot character) was never explained much in-game. He just turned up after the comic announced that he was here to stay.

And that really pisses me off, since by and large they don’t give the WoW books the same treatment, and I hate comics.

I haven’t played through the Worgen start area yet (avoided the beta) so I’m kinda hoping they explain some of the backstory cause it would totally suck if they didn’t. Plus it would just be plain confusing if we don’t know why these new Worgen are goodies.

Quick question: would it have been cheaper to buy the online version of the comic? I know, I know – as a comic reader myself, some of thrill is the actual feeling and smell of the pages. But maybe for checking stuff out, it’d be worth it to save a little, especially if the comic turns out to be lackluster?

I too am a Comic book reader (actually I read just about anything, my library is huge) I have warcraft and starcraft mangas and the comic book of Ashbringer. I am more than happy to learn the arrival of more Wow based reading material.

Who am I?

Gordon was born on the mean-streets of suburban Holland and learned to fist fight without remorse in steel cage matches at an early age. He now lives in Edinburgh with his wife and their imaginary Nigerian bodyguard, Mr Itunu.